Reliable Friends / Unreliable Friends

I woke up this morning with a severe sore throat that seemed to stretch all the way to my nose. I only had a mild sore throat last night and this morning's severity took me by surprise. Although I was awake, I simply couldn't get up and finally rolled out of bed at nearly 10am. A perfect ending to a night without electricity (my area was hit by a blackout. Bleargh!).

 

I SMSed my friend, Bronya, an aerobics instructor + nutritionist, who advised me on what to take... lots of water, fresh fruit juices, and plug myself with 3000mg of Vit C. Unfortunately I personally had only multivites so I dug into my mom's stores and among the many bottles came up with a full bottle of Vit C.... which expired exactly a year ago! I'm surprised it hadn't sprouted legs and run off when I opened it....

 

To cut a long story short, during lunch hour Bronya passed me some effervescent Vit C which my 'second mother' Helen had bought for me the moment she found out I needed some.

 

I've almost never had such reliable friends. I probably have only one or two others whom I could count on to help me like this, with or without me asking. I've always been independent all my life and I'm so used to doing things for myself that it seems quite unusual to me that people are actually willing to go out of their way to help me. Well, these two are of course among my best friends so of course that's a contributing factor. Personally, I wouldn't hesitate to do the same for them too, and for my other best friends.

 

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On another note, I received an SMS from another friend telling me to meet up on Saturday. When I asked the time/place, he simply replied by asking if I'm free on Saturday evening. I was already annoyed that he was telling me to meet up on Saturday, and I shot back by saying that I cannot reserve my entire evening hanging around waiting for a meeting and that I need to know the time/place to see if I'm free. Of course he got sarcastic with me in his next reply and gave a vague suggestion, to which I simply said that I will let him know later if I could make it.

 

I hate it when people simply assume that I'm free to meet up and that I'm dying to meet up with them! It's as if I have nothing better to do than to hang around on a Saturday night hoping to find some activity to relieve my social vacuum. It's as if they have no respect for my time.

 

People forget that I've filled up my time with all kinds of activities - although it's mostly with dance practice now, previously I had language classes, dance classes, gym; my friends make fun of me by saying they need to make appointments with me just to meet up with me. I've already tried to cut down and I generally keep my weekends to rest now. I used to fill up my weekends too but my schedule was slowly wearing me down, and I was advised by a well-meaning friend to reduce or I will get burnt out.

 

I suppose I was a bit short unnecessarily with my friend. But no, I don't regret it. I hate it when they make vague plans! It always happens with this bunch. They'll say, "Let's meet up this Saturday", and they get wishy-washy with where to go, and when they do finally agree, everyone else arrives 1-2 hours late. There was once where I was told that everyone was meeting up at A&W at 8pm, and so I went there only to wait... and wait.... and wait. Well, at least one other friend had also arrived early and was there to keep me company but by 9.30pm I had to leave and the others still hadn't arrived.

 

It's all very well to arrive fashionably late, but you know, I could do better things with my time than to hang around in an increasingly irritable mood. The least they could do was call.

Dance Option's competition on July 18th

Looks like I struck a nerve with some people with my last post! Sandra sweetie, thanks for your support about my line dance competition messes. Received some semi-good news. The Bangi comp which was supposed to be completely cancelled is on again with the proposed 1-day friendly event structure. I can't remember the proposed name for the event but I do know that it has the word 'carnival' in it. Somehow brings to mind circuses and trapeze acts. Anyway I guess our practice is not a total loss as we can still go into this comp to try to win the cash prize to recoup our finances. Hope we win, anyway. The bad news is that there will be no more competitions organised by Bangi in the future. A lot of people are sorely disappointed, I heard especially this talented dancer called Azira. The Bangi comp has only been held in the past 2 years, and for both years Azira won the amateur prize (only eligible to non-instructors, must participate in the maximum number of events in the comp, i.e. 4), and she needs to win the 3rd year running to take home the Equatorial cup. This year doesn't count as a comp, and without anymore competitions in the future, the poor girl cannot take the cup home. I can only imagine how she's feeling. It must be an incredible letdown after gearing herself up for this year. And now because of some screw-up that she's not in control of, she cannot take the cup home which she has been eyeing since the first year she won the amateur prize.

Anyway.... for those who didn't know, there was a latin/ballroom dancing competition on Sunday (July 18th) with a line dance category. My team entered the line dance group category.

The competition was pretty badly organised, with the programme released only on that day itself. We were told registration is from 9am onwards, so two of my teammates and I arrived by 9.20am, only to wait until 10am before a booth was finally set up. The events were split into the day and nighttime events... and our category was ONLY at night! A bit annoyed to find out that we had wasted our time. Deprived us of precious sleep...

So anyway we went home and zzz before coming back by 5pm only to wait around and wonder when our turn would be.

There are only 3 teams in our division (each team had to submit 2 dances). One of the teams had very cheerleader-like routines which would have been good if they had been more polished. Another team was from the PJ dance academy which had an interesting paso doble-style choreography for one dance and another was a dance they had done for last year's Bangi competition.

How did it go? Well... my team thought we did pretty well. We even had someone videotape us while we were dancing and when we watched it afterwards, we thought we looked quite good.
 
And.... we got 2nd placing.

Congrats, you say? Thank you very much!

No, I'm not boasting here. Actually my teammates and I were quite disappointed. To be honest, we thought we had put up a good show and we were aiming for the top prize. And truth be told... we were expecting to get first place. It didn't help that our conceit was fettered by others around us saying that they thought we were the best. To be fair, the winners were also good, but we thought we had given a fair fight.
 
As we went off for dinner afterwards (at 11pm) we talked about it and tried to understand what went wrong and only when our coach joined us later did we find out the truth. And the truth was, we reap what we sow... My coach was quite unhappy with our performance. She told us what we had done wrong, and she said that we deserved the placing that we got. She compared us constantly to the winners (who were from PJ dance academy). We had made no mistakes, no forgotten steps, nothing. Everything was on time. What went wrong was this: the music played was somehow a little slower than what we were used to, and she said that we lost our technique by allowing the music to control us, instead of the other way around. Yes, we were on time, and we followed the beat, but we had lost our sleekness and our sharpness that we had just 2 days ago by falling into the slower tempo of the music. That severely cost us our win.

We hadn't realised the trap we had allowed ourselves to fall into, and my coach was fair enough to accept that. We obviously had a lack of experience to respond to unfamiliar situations, and she told us to learn from this experience. Actually, we had the same problem with one of our earlier shows, and she was quite disappointed that we had not learnt from that experience. I guess we still have a long way more to go.

It was a bitter pill to swallow for all of us. We were on our own high horses, and we took a fall. My coach has never been one to sugar-coat her words, but I'm glad she gives it to us straight because otherwise, we would never learn. It was not a pleasant experience, but this is a good one to remind us our shortcomings and what we need to do to overcome them.

Well... hope for the best for Bangi!

(PS: My coach is having a dance party this Sunday. Anyone interested to come??? I'll be performing then. It's RM48 per head including food. Focus is on dancing though so bring your dancing shoes)